Diet of people in the past

[Justpastflouch]

I’m interested in history and quite often get recommended history “reels” on social media. A recent set of these has been AI generated animations of people from history (Roman soldier, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, immigrant at Ellis Island) and what they would typically eat in a day.

It really brought home how much manufactured crap we as society pump into ourselves. The food was very simple, all natural, not much meat, nothing very sugary. I’ve been cutting back on UPFs and this has given me another boost.

This might be a pointless contribution, but none the less.

My FIL was Greek and he did alot of the cooking for DH and his siblings as their mother really detested cooking. FWIW FIL was born in 1911. He's deceased now obviously.

He transformed my cooking. Because he used herbs as a salad leaf. He would buy (in London) great bunches of coriander, thyme, parsley. tarragon etc and would cut these up as the base for anything we would ordinarily use a salad leaf in. He also made an amazing dish where he would cook rice with more than half of fresh coriander plus lemon. It was called 'green rice'. It was like this but he used herbs not spinach. He taught me to be very heavy handed with spices and herbs and lemon.

www.olivetomato.com/greek-spinach-and-rice-spanakorizo/

That's very nice of you, @CharlotteCollinsneeLucas. I love Lark Rise too. Something that strikes me there is her sense that things have got much worse in a generation or too. She does make the point that wealth was something people expected to fluctuate and so people expected to be more prosperous when they'd got adult children and weren't yet unable to work. But she also notes that the older villagers were often better-resourced. I don't actually remember the details re. food plants, but I do remember her describing how all cottages had a 'Maiden's Blush' rose somewhere (because it is so easy to grow), but one cottage had a whole variety of old roses. I think she was looking at a way of life that had been above subsistence level until fairly recently.

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel I suppose tuna might be quite intimidating if you're not used to it? That colour!

@sashh, aside from cellars, TBH the best place to store root veg for as long as you can is in the ground. Things like leeks are still perfectly happy in the soil for a long time. Root veg like swedes you can pull and earth up, so they are in the cold soil but not still rooted in/low-lying enough to risk rotting, and frost is meant to help the taste of lots of things. It's potatoes, which are the newcomers, which really struggle with waterlogging and rot easily in the ground.

My cottage has a hard either floor with (very damaged) quarry tiles laid on top, and then some tosser has poured levelling concrete over it, which I wish they hadn't. But it isn't hard to get down to earth; it's really not far down and there aren't any foundations. Nice dark outbuildings for storing stuff in, though.

The rents are adorable. Nearer in to cities, in medieval England, you get rents of pretty things like a rose or a carnation ('gillyflower'), which is very cute.

You posted that as I typed and it made me laugh - so, I used to live somewhere where there were tons of Greek/Turkish grocers and it was easy to buy giant bunches of parsley and dill and mint. So we would often make those sorts of chopped salads where parsley is your basic structure and you use a lot of it (probably very good for you with all that iron).

Then I moved to benighted North Yorkshire. No giant bundles of herbs. One day I saw one in the local (slightly poncy) deli, and grabbed it with great delight, only to be crestfallen at the counter when I discovered it was 1) intended to be sold split up into tiny portions, and 2) would have cost an astronomical amount.

The greengrocer was totally bemused by my bemusement.

I have such great memories of my FIL. He was a difficult and forbidding man who made the most amazing food. Many of his recipes are in our family rotation now. And the Dcs (one of whom has food issues) are very accustomed to having coriander and parsley and dill with pretty much everything .

He sounds great. I love handed down recipes and food-as-memory.

I think it all went downhill in the Neolithic period with the shift from hunter gathering to growing crops.

Having grown up in an old farmhouse, with lots of family in farmhouses and cottages, I don't think it was until uni that I realised that houses didn't always have hard earth floors, even though I'd been to plenty of friends houses in town over the years. But then I was also a bit surprised that people called out Dynorod rather than getting their own draining rods out...

I grew up in an area with watercress beds, and we were always warned not to take it wild because of the risk of liver fluke.

I suspect hunters also died from starvation from time to time.

If I am right, I think researchers now reckon there was a much longer period when people were not precisely 'farming' the way we think of it now, but they were doing things to harness plant growth seasons and therefore eating a lot of plant-based materials. I mean, I guess, where is the line between farming and picking stuff when you know it is there ... and maybe encouraging it a bit?

I suspect so. And exposure. And from being gored by prey. And from foraging the wrong thing.

I miss him dreadfully.I never met DH's mother as she died before we met. Her culinary legacy for our family is boiled beetroot in white sauce. . They deffo brought different talents to the family. She was the breadwinner and worked for the civil service. The other strong legacy was that all her children were strong feminists.

I mentioned earlier about Max Miller on youtube with his history food channel. I really recommend him- he's amazing. If anyone if interested in food history then he is a researched and entertaining gateway.

I remember when I was quite young reading a book about the people of St Kilda, and one of the things I particularly remember us that they had developed prehensile toes, which helped with climbing the cliffs when they collected gulls eggs.

Hunter gatherers did have better overall health though than after farming started, were taller, with better bone and dental health and injested a wider range of nutrients and had less infectious disease.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3917328/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9169634

That sounds lovely and I was actually pondering the way we seem perfectly well able to accept that poor rural people in France and the Mediterranean ate interesting food but are incapable of imagining the same for England.
I suppose it is because we haven’t had a peasant culture for so long due to early industrialisation we have forgotten what one looked like.

Re massive amounts of herbs, there is a plan for an ideal medieval monastery garden and it involves a surprisingly large amount of space devoted to parsley. Someone explained this was probably edible parsley root. But if you were growing that it would still produce the masses of greenery.

Yes its essentially why 'UK' tabbouleh is nothing like what it should be. Tabbouleh is a parsley salad, not a salad of carbs with some herbs thrown in it. It should be green with very little bulgur in it.

Woah.
I wonder if they had the same in the Yorkshire coast.
I met an old man at Flamborough whose dad used to be winched down the cliffs for seabird eggs. It was called egging.
St Kilda is another level though.

Semi-prehensile toes run in my family. We don't have properly opposable big toes (which I think is pretty rare) but we all have long grippy ones. If I weren't terrible with heights I could test them out.

I didn’t know that!
This thread is brilliant.

I just stick to picking things up from the floor with my feet (though my toes are mostly stubby - I had a boyfriend who could sort of curl his toes under, like fingers on a fist.)

There's a lot of sentimentality on here when reality was much different. In a well know Scottish city over half of the men were deemed unfit to be soldiers in WW1 due to malnourishment. I have babies dying from that area from " failure to thrive" - mothers were being encouraged to feed tinned milk to their babies. We're not speaking about the Middle Ages or famines - normal times. Shocking.

What do you think is sentimentality?

I think there's a lot of people conflating different time periods. But someone has already made the point about men in recent times being too malnourished to qualify for active duty. Most of the nostalgic posts about the past being good for food are put in context of someone acknowledging they were talking about a specific situation (eg., being the child of someone trained as a cook, or whatever).

Babies still die from 'failure to thrive,' btw. It's rare, but it hasn't ceased to exist as phrase, even though in the UK I think it's frowned upon.

I can do that.

See, now I have a proper, documented skill. I shall venture forth and seek my fortune within the narrow confines of egg-hunting and/or the circus.

I can pick things up with mine and people think it's weird

I can pick things up with mine, short and dtibby though they be. A friend who has done a lot of ballet in her life was impressed - apparently it's good for strengthening your toes for dancing. I do it out of laziness, to avoid bending down...

Not that that is anything to do with food.

It was probably about more than the taste. Cumin and caraway are carminative (ease digestion and help with wind).